From Kabul to Kentucky

From the outside, St Anthony’s Catholic Church in Louisville, Kentucky, looks the same as it always has, but over the past few weeks, the interior has been transformed into a makeshift department store.

In place of its wooden pews are rows of clothing, kitchenware, home decor and countless other goods, donated by community members in preparation for the arrival of hundreds of Afghan refugees.

“Our phone was ringing off the hook the moment things went down in Afghanistan, starting in August,” said Alison Voit, assistant director of Migration and Refugee Services at Catholic Charities, a resettlement organisation in the southern US city.

“We just couldn’t keep up with the calls.”

In the weeks following the calamitous US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, Catholic Charities and other refugee organisations in Kentucky have been inundated by offers of support.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said John Koehlinger, executive director of Kentucky Refugee Ministries.

For more than two decades, he has helped to resettle refugees in Louisville, a vibrant, food-rich city of more than 500,000 people. Previous refugees have come from Cuba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Balkan Wars and more recently the civil war in Syria.

Louisville residents have stepped up each time, but the Afghanistan crisis struck a particularly deep chord.

“There is a bipartisan element, people who have been affiliated with the military know the role that some of these people played in supporting US forces and the US mission in Afghanistan,” Mr Koehlinger said.

The numbers

Kentucky has agreed to take in 850 Afghans, with 350 coming to Louisville, the state’s largest city.

Louisville is a liberal city in a deeply conservative state. Its history is entwined with slavery and, more recently, issues of police brutality against black people – most notably last year’s killing of Breonna Taylor in a botched raid.

The city has long prided itself on welcoming immigrants. The many Middle Eastern, Cuban and Italian restaurants that line its streets attest to that heritage.

“Louisville is a very compassionate city,” said Maha Kolko, a Syrian refugee, who now works for Kentucky Refugee Ministries.
“What the community here is trying to do is make sure that [Afghans] will be taken care of.”

To date, Louisville has received only a handful of refugees, mostly relatives of Hamidullah Haqanzai, an Afghan who worked with the US Army Corp of Engineers and who has lived in Louisville since 2018.

He was in Kabul for a family wedding this summer when the Taliban swept to power, and he managed to get several of his relatives on to evacuation flights.

His family have since settled in Louisville and gone through health screenings at the Family Community Clinic, which offers free check-ups to new immigrants. 

The clinic is staffed by retired doctors and medical professionals, who volunteer their time.

“It was a very humbling experience to hear their stories of how they got here, and what conditions were like in Afghanistan before they could get out,” said Mary Lou Reichert, who carried out medical check-ups for the women and children.

Camp Atterbury

The vast majority of Afghan refugees in the US are currently staying at military bases. About 53,000 evacuees, whom the military refers to as “guests”, are staying at eight military installations in the US, from Texas to Virginia.

Camp Atterbury in Edinburgh, Indiana, is the closest military installation to Louisville where Afghans are accommodated.

Spread across 106 square kilometres of gently rolling farmland, Camp Atterbury has been transformed from an army training base into a small, bustling Afghan village of 6,700 people.

“In a matter of days we more than doubled the population of Edinburgh,” said Aaron Batt, a federal co-ordinator for the Department of Homeland Security.

Roadblocks have been set up around the base to slow traffic and protect the hundreds of children playing in the street.

At one checkpoint, near a barracks housing refugees, a young girl with pink shoes and a blue sweatshirt two sizes too big sauntered over to soldiers with a big grin on her face and gave them a thumbs-up. 

It’s a scene US soldiers serving in Afghanistan saw frequently for nearly two decades.

Doctors, Engineers and Politicians

As they wade through the complex and often confusing resettlement process, many Afghans are making Camp Atterbury home.

Sulaman Abdulzada, 28, an engineer, and his wife Arzo, who hopes to become a doctor, were so taken by the Indiana landscape and their experience with US troops that they decided to get married at the base chapel. 

The couple blended their Afghan traditions with those of their new homeland and a local imam presided over their hybrid wedding.

“It was beautiful,” Mr Abdulzada said. “It was like a dream come true.”

The couple, from Mazar-i-Sharif, were forced to flee because Ms Abdulzada’s father had worked closely with the US military. His parents travelled with him in Indiana, while his sister remains in Afghanistan.

They were able to get on a flight from Mazar to Doha and eventually made their way to Camp Atterbury, where they are completing their paperwork.

Aziz Sadat, 58, fled with his wife and two young children. He had held several positions in former Afghan government in Kabul. 

He spends hours online each day scouring sites for news from Afghanistan as he completes his family’s resettlement process.
While he would prefer to be home in Kabul, he said life on the base is more than comfortable.

“There’s a lot of open spaces,” he told The National. “We have established classes for English, and for small kids there are many activities.”

The US government tries to reunite refugees with friends and family already living in America.

If no loved ones are already in the US, refugees are resettled according to where resources are available. That’s where cities such as Louisville come in.

The city’s economy has increased by 1.5 per cent in the past year and the cost of living is considerably lower than in other major US cities, making it a good place for new immigrants.